"This merge window was smaller in terms of number of commits than the 3.10 merge window, but we actually have more new lines," Torvalds wrote in his Linux 3.11 rc1 announcement. " Most of that seems to be in staging - a full third of all changes by line-count is staging, and merging in Lustre is the bulk of that."

Lustre is a high performance computing (HPC) filesytem effort that has a number of different masters in recent years. Lustre was first backed by Cluster File Systems which was acquired by Sun Microsystems in 2007. Sun became part of Oracle in 2010. Oracle never really pushed Lustre forward, instead others in the open source community, including Whamcloud, stepped up to the plate. Whamcloud itself was acquired a year ago by Intel in July of 2012.

In February of 2013, Xyratex Ltd acquired the name 'Lustre' and its associated intellectual property assets from Oracle.

Lustre isn't the only filesystem in Linux 3.11. Both Ext4 and XFS receive notable improvements in the first rc of 3.11.

Linux kernel developer Ted Ts'o noted in an lkml message that there are lots of bug fixes, cleanups and optimizations for ext4.

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor Linux Planet and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.